A "Thank You" Note With a Purpose

With the holiday season ending, the demand for cute, clever and creative gifts is dwindling. Which brings us to a new phase of the holiday: the post holiday thank you notes. Not everyone sends them but I was raised to. I usually procrastinate an embarrassingly long time to send them but with my new rule, I have been getting better. I decided that I wasn't allowed to cash any checks until thank you notes have been written. I don't know it anyone cares to receive them but I feel guilty if I don't send them. I typically don't care if I ever get one so why would someone else care? This year I was thinking about buying my thank you cards and hating it. You see, I have a stack of them at my parents house. That is six hours away. I could have written those thank you cards last week when I was there but... The procrastination. Then it came to me. What about recipe cards? I promptly chose  my favorite recipes and rewrote them on nice recipe cards that I already had. I then wrote my thanks on the back like a post card. Brilliant! I even matched recipes to who I think would enjoy them the most. So if you are trying to muster up the willpower to write some thank you cards try this. It's much more fun and hopefully more rewarding!

DIY Ice Cream Cake

As I mentioned in my last post, in one long night I made 21 different cakes. One of these was an ice cream cake. My mom used to make these for parties when I was a kid so for this party, I called her and asked how to make them. Turns out it much simpler than I expected. Why spend $30 on an ice cream cake when you can make one for about $5?

What you need:

-Ice Cream (I used vanilla)

-Hostess Ho-Ho Cakes 

(Do they still exist? I'm sure you could find something similar.)

I used a bundt pan because it looks pretty and it has slots making it easy to know where to cut slices. I took the ice cream out to soften for a little while. You do not want it to be liquid but you need to be able to squish it. While the ice cream was softening I unwrapped a bunch of Ho-Hos and squished them into the pan and packed it down as best as I could. How much you use depends on what pan you are using and how much cake you want in your ice cream cake. Once I had the Ho-Hos squished into the pan, I then squished the ice cream into the pan and then made sure it was flat. I put it back in the freezer to solidify a bit and then popped it out of the pan and put it on the plate when I was ready for it. Yum!

Coolest Cake Ever

When one my bestest best friends was turning 21 (and nobody else was) we decided to throw her a party. Since we could not do anything with drinking, we did a lot of eating. I stayed up all night in our dorm's lounge and made 21 different cakes.  There were nowhere near enough people at the party to eat all of that cake. I started sending home cakes as party gifts by the end of the party. Good times...

This was by far my favorite cake that I made that long sleepless night. It is so simple to make but was sooooo good. 

What you need:

-Chocolate Cake Mix

-Vanilla or Yellow Cake Mix

-Strawberry Cake Mix

-Eggs, oil or whatever the boxes say you need

-Vanilla Frosting

-Three round cake pans

Its pretty straightforward. I did not use all of the mix from the boxes on this cake. The rest of the mix went to some of the other 20 cakes. All did was make one round of each flavor and then layered them with vanilla frosting. Ta-da!! Neapolitan Cake!

For those of you who are curious and want to know what some of the other cakes are, lets see how many I can remember. 

Ice Cream Cake shown above... hmmmm that might need its own post...

1. Neopolitan
2. Chocolate with Vanilla Frosting
3. Chocolate with Chocolate Frosting
4. Vanilla with Vanilla Frosting
5. Vanilla with Chocolate Frosting
6. Strawberry with Strawberry Frosting?
7. Strawberry with Vanilla Frosting
8. Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting
9. Red Velvet with Cream Cheese Frosting
10. Red Velvet with Vanilla Frosting
11. Devils Food Cake
12. Angel Food Cake
13. Ice Cream Cake
14. Barbie Cake
15. Some Cupcakes of Various Flavors and Frostings...
16. That is all I can remember at this point.... If I find my list from back then I will edit the post later.

Beach in a Block

When I was fourteen, my family went to NYC to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center along with some other touristy sights. I barely remember the day except for the fact that my older brother had asked if he could bring his "friend" with us. We then found out that she was his new girlfriend. Fast forward a few years, Bethany came on a family vacation with us to Aruba. We had a blast. She was already a part of our family. One night, Ryan and Bethany took a bottle of wine and two glasses and went down to the beach to look at the stars. When they came back, they were engaged. My brother married his high school sweetheart almost two years ago and I am so happy because of it. I could not have picked someone better for Ryan. 

All of that back story is to give this DIY some meaning. I like to give gifts to people that will mean something. The first Christmas that they were married, I decided to make this for them.

All I did was take a simple craft block that I bought at Michaels like this one

and filled it with sand, a few shells, a cork and a picture from that night when he proposed. It probably cost less than $20 for the whole thing and turned out beautifully. I have seen some really clever things done with craft blocks. People use them as wedding centerpieces, fish tanks, they fill them with candy, Christmas lights, cover them with paper mache and light them up... you name it. What have you done with craft blocks?

My Broken Heart

So when you have such a messy room as I did growing up, breaking things is inevitable. Fortunately I am not superstitious because with the amount of mirrors I have stepped on and broke, I would have bad luck for the next few decades. Most of the time I did not care too much. This one mirror though was pretty nice though. it was a weird squished oval shape with a handle and it was salon quality. It was a gift from my mom so of course I felt bad when I broke it... When I was cleaning out the mess I saw that some of the pieces broke in some pretty cool shapes. I played around with it for a little while and then grabbed some sticky tack and this is what I ended up with.

While it might not work out so well if I tried to duplicate it, I was really happy with how it turned out. I love having mirrors in my room. The way they reflect the light, it just makes everything brighter and lovely! I ended up taking the mirror down when I had to repaint the walls and I still miss it to this day... I did however cut my hand really badly on the sharp edge as it came down.... So yeah. If you ever try to do something like this, broken mirrors and broken glass are actually sharp and dangerous. Who would have guessed. So go make something beautiful out of a stupid mistake! Let me know if you create something awesome that you want to brag about!

Cheap and Easy Costume

Around mid October of last year, my Colonial New England History professor told the class we could come in costume to class on Halloween since class was from 6-9pm. I love costumes. I never dressed up for Halloween as a kid, but I did dress up on normal days. Oh how I love costumes. I'm so weird. Anyway. The syllabus said that we would be discussing Native Americans on that night so, of course, I decided to dress up as Princess Tiger Lily from the live action version of Peter Pan. Though the character was fictional, the actress playing her is Iroquois and I always loved her in that movie. I did not want to spend $60 on an already put together costume. Costumes for girls/ women above the age of 9 tend to be tight, short and modeled on the package by someone with a seductive look on her face. I'm sure there is a time and place for that, however class is not one of them. I was able to make my entire costume (using the word make loosely) for under $20. It was wonderful.

• Huge brown men's shirt-- Clearance for $2
• Brown corduroy pants which can be reused-- $10
• Tube of face paint-- $1
• Hair clip with leather string, beads and feathers-- $2
• Headband-- a strip that I cut off the shirt
• Shoes-- moccasin slippers I already owned

How to make it look like a costume instead of an awkward outfit gone wrong:

The shirt had a picture and some words on it so I just turned it inside out. I cut the bottom into a V shape so that the sides were shorter than the front and back. I then cut strips into the bottom (they can vary  in length depending on the length of the shirt). I also cut off the collar (keeping it in once piece for later) and added a v-neck shape. For the face paint, I used a foam makeup applicator spongy thing and dabbed it onto my face. I put more towards my forehead and then dabbed down so that it was darker at the top and blended and got lighter towards the middle of my face. I braided my hair, stuck the clip onto the collar, and then used the collar as a headband. It was nothing elaborate or fancy but it worked. (Not the best picture I could have taken but this was before I decided to share it with you)

I came to class and realized that I was the only person who actually dressed up but I didn't mind. It was a tiny class and everyone loved my costume plus I had a lot of fun with it. Try making your own costume sometime!! Whether it is similar to mine or not, I'd love to hear about it!!

How to Remove that Awful Wallpaper Border You Have Had Since Middle School or Earlier

Here is my border... which is finally gone and shredded into a million pieces.

There is nothing wrong with it, it was just not my taste. After a few years, I hardly noticed it anymore but now it is time for it to finally come down. I am in the process of redoing my room (YAY!) which involved removing the boarder, painting, and getting new carpets and furniture. I of course had never removed any type of wallpaper before and so was a bit unsure of where to begin. I searched the internet to see what everyone else suggested and then ended up modifying the results to however I felt like doing it. *NOTE* I was not very careful and ended up scraping up paint and reaching drywall. This was not a problem since I knew I was painting however if you are not planning on painting this is probably not the best idea...

It was not that hard (although my arms were tired after a while) and the best part is....

No fancy tools required!!

What I used:

1)Spray bottle filled with water

2)An ordinary kitchen spatula

3)An old shirt to dry any drips of water or glue

First I tried peeling off some of the paper since the edges were lifting. That actually worked out best since my brand of paper was somewhat waterproof. Once the I got to the bottom layer of the paper I was able to spray it with water to the point of saturation.

When the paper is saturated, both the paper and the glue begin to weaken, making the whole removal process somewhat easy.

All that was left was to scrape off the rest of the paper with the spatula and vacuum up the mess of shredded paper that fell to the floor!!

Having trouble? For stubborn paper, wet it and then go to the kitchen and have a sandwich or bowl of cereal. After eating said food, return to the room being beautified and spray it again so you can get to work. Sometimes that extra time given to allow the water to seep into the paper really helps. If you let it dry too much though, the extra spray may have been a waste.

Still having trouble? I could try to give more advice however I have only done this that one time in the pictures so try asking someone at a hardware store. They tend to know everything.

Good Luck!